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To recapture poetic reality in a tottering world, we may have to revise, once more, the idea of a poem as an expression of the ‘contents’ of a subjectivity. Some poems, at least, and some types of poetic language, constitute structures of a singularly radiant kind, where ‘self-expression’ has undergone a profound change of function. We experience these structures, if not as revelations of being, then as apertures upon being. We experience them as we experience nothing else.
Middleton’s argument is hortator y, not polemical, pulling back the corner on a creative possibility which looks new but is in fact the fons et origo of all creative work with language. He had Whitman in mind, among others, and his essay which starts in archaeolog y ends in the vivid presences that language discloses.
Coleridge, like Middleton a great English Germanist, preser ved some galumphing hexameters dedicated to ‘Dear William and dear Dorothea’. Why would he keep such words? The other wise unfortunate fragment concludes with a kind of Whitmanesque openness, or openingness. … my eyes are a burthen,
Now unwillingly closed, now open and aching with darkness. O! what a life is the eye! what a strange and inscrutable essence! Him that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms him; Him that never beheld the swelling breast of his mother; Him that smiled in his gladness as a babe that smiles in its slumber; Even for him it exists, it moves and stirs in its prison; Lives with a separate life, and ‘Is it a Spirit?’ he murmurs: ‘Sure it has thoughts of its own, and to see is only a language.’
Not a great or even a good passage of poetr y, but one does not ask that kind of excellence from such sustained clarity of language, of seeing. It is different in kind from other verse, with a linguistic consistency and authority all its own, at once because and regardless of its subject matter, echoes and allusions. It is not so far from this to ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’. They come from another realm, are in a different register from poems of his which respond to prose analysis, can be taken apart and reassembled, that have design and designs on their addressees and respond to paraphrase. ‘Kubla Khan’ occurs. It is not an act of the poet’s conscious will but of a shared imagination. Coleridge never knew where it came from and could never secure another poem from that source. ‘“Is it a Spirit?” he murmurs.’ Words have first and second intentions, Walter Pater said, and a poem built on second intentions can contain that Spirit. Think of Emily Dickinson’s ‘The Heart Asks Pleasure First’, or take this speech from Measure for Measure where the second intentions are embodied in echo and etymolog y, as in the emboldened words.
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the de-lighted spirit To bathe in fier y floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling –